


Post, Propter

by shellcollector



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas, Cuddling, Illnesses, Love in a time of no antibiotics, Multi, Nineteenth century medicine, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 02:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17133218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellcollector/pseuds/shellcollector
Summary: Seemingly unrelated illnesses disturb the trio's Christmas and New Year, and Musichetta struggles to untangle her feelings.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [estelraca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estelraca/gifts).



Celia, halfway through packing her clothes into a carpet bag, glanced across the room. “Are you quite sure you don’t want me to stay in Paris? I don’t want you to be miserable here on your own.”  
  
Musichetta sighed. Truthfully, she was feeling rather miserable already, and she’d only taken to her bed that afternoon. She wasn’t used to getting ill, even if it was only a sore throat.  
  
She must have made a face, for Celia put down a folded nightdress and crossed the room to sit on the bed.  
  
“You do, don’t you?” she said. “Listen, I’ll tell my mamma —”  
  
“No, no.” Musichetta felt suddenly annoyed, although she couldn’t say with whom. “I’ll be all right. I’m quite cosy here, and I can watch the snow falling from the window, and make a little tea on the stove. I was going to have a quiet Christmas anyway, all by myself.”  
  
“Why, have both of your men thrown you over at once?”  
  
“No, they’re both going South at once, which is just as bad. Joly is taking Lesgle with him to his parents’ for Christmas, and leaving me behind, and — ah, I don’t mind, really, ignore me, it’s just the fever.”  
  
Celia put a handkerchief in Musichetta’s hands and then hugged her, hard.  
  
“You poor dear!” she said. “I’ll stay, I really will.”  
  
“Please don’t,” said Musichetta, crying into the handkerchief. “I don’t want you to. I’ll feel bad, thinking of your family missing you - but you’re very sweet, really you are. I think I just need to sleep.”  
  
“Well.” Celia looked at her earnestly. “You’ll send for a doctor if you feel very bad?”  
  
“Oh, of course I will, don’t worry about that. There’s Joly’s friend in town, still — his good friend — and I know where some of the other medical students live, because he made me memorise the names in case — well, you know how he gets.”  
  
“And what are you going to eat? I think I should go and fetch you a loaf of bread, and a pie, perhaps, and some little cakes in case your stomach feels delicate.”  
  
Musichetta laughed at that; it was like Celia to think of food almost before anything else. “All right,” she said. “My purse is on the table. Thank you, truly.”  
  
“It’s no trouble,” said Celia. “I was thinking anyway I should get myself something for the journey — you always find you’re hungry just when there’s nowhere to get anything to eat. I’ll get the things once I’ve finished packing. Will you sleep, do you think?”  
  
“I think so, probably.”  
  
“Well then, I’ll try not to wake you.”  
  
Musichetta lay back and watched Celia as she packed, enjoying the precise way she folded the fabric, the curve of her freckled arms, the way she smoothed the lace flat when she put a dress in the bag. She could feel herself sinking into a dream. Celia kissed her cheek, and said, ‘I’ll be back soon, darling,’ and the pillow rose up about Musichetta’s head to engulf her, like the waves of a vast ocean, each one rhythmically rising and falling and topped with a crest of foam.  
  
  
It was evening when she woke, and the room was empty. The fire had died down, and there was a pile of bakery boxes on the dresser. Her throat stung and her limbs ached, but she pulled herself up out of bed to put another log in the grate.  
  
Then a knock on the door — or rather, four in quick succession, a pattern she knew well, although it didn’t make sense to be hearing it. She wrapped herself in her dressing-gown and opened the door.  
  
“Oh, bother,” said Joly. “I didn’t think you’d be asleep.”  
  
“I wasn’t,” said Musichetta. “But you shouldn’t be in Paris, should you? Weren’t you leaving this morning?”  
  
“Well, we ought to have, but Bossuet’s ill. He’s a wretched sore throat, and I don’t think he’s well enough to travel, and besides, I know I’ll be ill too in a few days — we always end up sharing each other’s colds, somehow — and so what’s the use? Anyway, he’s sleeping, so I thought I’d come to see you and tell you we were still here after all.”  
  
“Since I haven’t anything better to do, and now neither do you.”  
  
“That’s not what I meant by it at all — oh, dear, I should have come earlier, I suppose. But I didn’t want to leave him - and it’s only nine. I certainly didn’t mean to wake you up.”  
  
“And I’ve told you that I wasn’t asleep!”  
  
“This room’s awfully cold.”  
  
“It’s just the draught in the doorway,” she said, but didn’t ask him in.  
  
“Well, I’m sorry, anyway,” he said. “Would you rather I hadn’t come? Or should I go, now? I wanted to see you, that’s all. Maybe it’s — well, I don’t know, Bossuet said it was his bad luck again, but I thought it was rather good luck after all, perhaps, since this way we’ll have Christmas together, you know.”  
  
“Oh, will we? How do you know I’ve not made other plans?”  
  
“Oh. I’m sorry.” He twisted his hands. “Have you, then?”  
  
It was no use; she was terribly glad to see him. “No,” she said honestly. “I’ve got a sore throat too, I feel dreadful. I was just lying in bed, feeling sorry for myself.”  
  
“Oh dear!” He had that expression of exaggerated — but wholly sincere — concern which she found alternately irritating and endearing. “Will you let me take a look at you?”  
  
“If you think it wise, doctor.”  
  
“I do! I do!” he muttered, as if oblivious to her teasing, and followed her into the room.  
  
  
She let him feel her forehead, take her pulse, examine her tongue, and prod her under the chin while muttering something about glands.  
  
“Hm,” he said. “Nothing too concerning just at present, or at least nothing that isn’t to be expected - you’ve a fever, though I suppose you know that, and your glands are swollen, and there’s an exudate on your tongue and tonsils that suggests a great deal of inflammation; but no sign of suppuration, so that’s good.[1] ****I suppose you’d better come home with me until you’re better, so that I can keep an eye on both of you at once.”  
  
“Maybe Lesgle should come here,” said Musichetta, grumpily.  
  
He rubbed his nose with his cane thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. All my instruments are back at my rooms, and my materia; and the air and light are superior, to say nothing of the fields. You’d better not walk, though — it’s started to snow, and I don’t want you getting a chill. We’ll wrap you up as warmly as we can and take a cab. Here, let me help you to pack up some things?”  
  
She pouted. “There’s a pie on the dresser, I think, and some bread and cakes. We shouldn’t leave them behind, it’ll be an awful waste.”  
  
“I don’t think you should be eating, in fact —”  
  
She saw where this was going. “If you give me a purge, I shall go home at once, even if I have to walk barefoot through the snow. I am warning you.”  
  
“Very well, very well. Now, you stay in bed, won’t you, and give me directions.”  
  
  
By the time they arrived at Joly’s flat she was feeling worse. The cold wind roared in her ears as Joly fumbled for his key to the building, and by the time they had climbed up to the second floor she was almost ready to faint onto the first convenient item of furniture.  
  
Lesgle, sitting by the window, greeted them merrily, though he looked rather pale.  
  
“I saw you both draw up in a carriage,” he exclaimed. “Musichetta! How lovely to see you. That pile of blankets suits you very well; it shows off your figure marvellously.”  
  
Joly tutted. “Really, I thought we’d agreed you were going to get some rest.”  
  
“Oh, I slept for a little while, but then I woke up and my head ached, so I’ve been  watching at the window to amuse myself. It is a poor fellow’s theatre. I saw an elderly bourgeois in knee-breeches slip on a rotten potato, and a goat making off with a pretty girl’s hat.”  
  
“And this illness will make off with you, if you keep on exposing yourself to the winter air. Let me get Musichetta settled, and then I’ll examine you and determine the extent of the damage.”  
  
Joly helped her to the bed, and she felt, as she often did, a bitter struggle in her heart between self-protection and tenderness. What would it mean, she wondered, to surrender to the latter, just at this moment — to let herself be gentle with him, even though her limbs felt jellylike and the way he threaded anxious fingers through his hair — and, for that matter, if she was honest with herself, the way that Lesgle’s eyelashes had dropped against tired cheeks — ran her heart through with such a painful, vulnerable sweetness that she felt she could hardly breathe?  
  
“I always think,” said Joly, almost as if he read her mind, “that you must have been a terrible trouble as a child, when you were ill.”  
  
“A terrible temper, you mean?” she asked. “I’m sure I had a tantrum or two, but I was quite a robust child, so I can’t have been ill very often. Although all children are, to some extent, I suppose.”  
  
“No, I didn’t mean that,” said Joly, frowning to himself. “I don’t know what I meant, really, but it’s a thing that occurs to me, that’s all.”  
  
“I think I know,” said Lesgle, his eyelids fluttering open. “He means that you were very angry sometimes to be treated kindly, if you really needed it; and that you hated to be ignored, and hated not to be ignored, and that must have placed your poor nurse into quite the predicament, forced either to offend you or the law of non-contradiction, and not sure which would be metaphysically worse.”  
  
“I didn’t have a nurse,” said Musichetta.  
  
“Quite, quite. Your doctor, rather.”  
  
He was altogether too sharp sometimes, and it infuriated her.  
  
  
She slept a confusing night of pattern and colour, as if her eyelids were a roll of printed calico or silk brocade. Joly had dosed her with some of his homeopathic remedies - Mercurius and Belladonna, who sounded like a pair of fatally beautiful seducers, but who took the form that evening of a couple of sugary tablets which dissolved upon her tongue[2].  
   
When she woke, Joly’s friend Combeferre was peering down the throat of a patient Lesgle, while Joly looked on intently.  
  
“Hmm, yes,” Combeferre murmured. He was holding Lesgle’s tongue down with some sort of implement. “A classic presentation of cynanche tonsillaris[3].; there’s no ulceration, which is good, and the white spots are quite commonly found.”  
  
Lesgle raised his eyebrows at her and made A Face.  
  
Joly’s mouth twisted. “Did you see the exudate?”  
  
“I did. Still classical, which you know. Nothing to be concerned about at present. I take it the pulse has been strong throughout?”  
  
“Very. High, though, never below a hundred. And I —”  
  
Combeferre, interrupting, smiled gently. “I’ll get to you soon, friend.”  
  
“No, I just meant — the swelling isn’t too great, is it, do you think? I didn’t think so, but then last night I woke and imagined that maybe — well, it’s difficult to tell. He was snoring, and he doesn’t usually, but I couldn’t check without waking him… ”  
  
“That’s also to be expected. These cases do sometimes, hm, there can be reversals, but nothing concerns me greatly just at present, and nothing should concern you greatly either.  But again, you know that. Shall we take a look at your other patient? I think she’s awoken.”  
  
Combeferre’s touch was gentler than Joly’s; or rather, it was only gentleness she felt, and not the worry resonating beneath it, like a single note rather than a chord played on a violin.  
  
“Again,” he said, “very much the usual presentation, with nothing especially ominous, thank goodness. I’m not as convinced as you are that it’s contagious.”  
  
“But Combeferre, surely, the circumstances make that almost undeniable.”  
  
“And yet, consider that the circumstances give almost no opportunity for purulent matter to be transmitted, unless it took a cab halfway across town. Lesgle wasn’t ill the last time they saw each other. Post hoc, certainly, but I wouldn’t like to bet on the propter[4].”  
  
“Well, and there’s myself. My pulse has been high since Bossuet first felt ill.”  
  
“Which may be nervous, but I promise I’ll look you over. Just let me just listen to that chest first, to be sure of myself; I wouldn’t like to reassuring without being satisfied that the infection was confined only to the throat.”  
  
“Did you manage to borrow a thermometer?” Joly asked.  
  
“I did, but I can’t join you in the experiment, unfortunately; I have ward rounds in an hour.” He was tapping at her chest, his face calm and absorbed as he pressed his ear against the tube. “Perfectly clear on the left, you were correct there. I’m certainly interested, though it surprises me that you’re so concerned with measuring heat when you’ve argued so many times for the fundamentally vascular character of febrile states.”  
  
“And I still would! But I wouldn’t deny the significance of a rising or falling temperature either, if only to give us information about the circulation in addition to that provided by the character of the pulse[5].”  
  
“It’s intriguing, certainly. The right lung is also sound. Let me know if  that changes, and of course if there are ulcers, or if a tumour[6] begins to form - in fact, if that happens you should come straight to the hospital if you’re not able to get hold of me.”  
  
“Of course. And thank you.”  
  
“Not at all. Now, shall I look at your throat?”  
  
“Please. I’m sure I feel something there, almost like something stuck in my windpipe — and my submandibular glands are of a normal size, but the texture seems more peculiar every time I feel them.”  
  
The examination went the way of many she had witnessed, with Combeferre assuring Joly that he could not see whatever it was that Joly could feel, and Joly grudgingly allowing his fears to be somewhat assuaged.  
  
“So then, as to treatment,” said Combeferre with a sigh. “I really ought to recommend a standard antiphlogistic course[7]; everything speaks to it, but I don’t suppose I’ll persuade you.”  
  
“It’s not that I don’t see any value in allopathic[8] medicine.”  
  
“I should hope not; you’ve seen it effecting enough cures at the hospital, surely.”  
  
“But it’s unsystematic, you must admit that. Our understanding of physiology has advanced so much since Paracelsus, but our cures hardly at all — doesn’t that bother you?”  
  
Combeferre pinched at the bridge of his nose, a troubled expression on his face. “Of course it does. And perhaps Hahnemann is correct, or the Hindus with their Ayur Veda, or the Chinese who cure with needles — I don’t know. But for now I find it difficult to suggest anything but the remedies I’ve seen working — and others have seen, too.”  
  
“Musichetta has already rejected the antiphlogistic course, besides.”  
  
“I have,” said Musichetta, as firmly as she could. “I’ll not be purged, at least unless I’m in far more danger than you seem to think I am.”  
  
Combeferre shrugged wearily, and gave a wry smile. “That settles it, I suppose. Take good care of each other, you three.”  
  
Joly showed him out, and Lesgle shifted himself over to her side of the bed.  
  
“He really is going to be ill, I think,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t like to contradict Combeferre, but there’s a way he has when he’s getting something.”  
  
“Perhaps you should transfer to the medical school yourself,” she suggested. “It couldn’t go worse for you than the law.”  
  
“Alas, I have an inconvenient dislike of corpses, which has indeed got in the way of my attending law lectures, but would also dissuade me from the medical sort. Whether at the podium or under the knife, I prefer my lectures sine corpore — leaving me very few options.”  
  
“Is it only the human kind that trouble you? Could you become a veterinarian?”  
  
“There one encounters another difficulty, which is that when I see a nice rump steak, I don’t want to cut it up for veins; I want to cook it and eat it. I should spend my whole course of study with a rumbling stomach, and finally would be expelled for dribbling saliva onto an instructional rack of lamb, if I did not lose my composure altogether one hungry day and swallow an entire heart, veins and all, causing me to be ejected from the school in utter disgrace.”  
  
“I think you’d find many of the specimens have been preserved[9],” said Joly cheerily, coming back into the room. “Some with alcohol, which wouldn’t be so bad, but others with turpentine, which even a good sauce couldn’t make palatable. We had a man come into the hospital, an artist, who had drunk a cupful of the stuff by mistake[10]. He went entirely blind, proclaimed himself to be in a state of bliss, and then bled from everywhere — mouth, anus, penis, it was quite a sight to behold. He died, of course.”  
  
“I recall,” said Lesgle. “You double checked your wine-glasses for months afterwards.”  
  
“I still do, especially at Grantaire’s — you never know when he’ll take up painting again. Now, I think you should both have another dose of Mercurius, and perhaps some sort of hot tea, to calm the inflammation of the throat, according to the homeopathic principle.”  
  
  
Lesgle was right, of course. Joly complained of his throat with increasing insistence, and began to shiver with fever the next morning, while he was halfway through measuring Musichetta’s temperature once again with the thermometer. He seemed, on the whole, to be heartened by this development.  
  
“I did tell Combeferre,” he said. “Didn’t I?”  
  
“Of course you did, darling,” said Musichetta, trying to rub his back with one hand while lying on her back with the thermometer wedged under her arm, a position she’d occupied for the last quarter of an hour[11].  
  
“Now, Joly,” said Lesgle. “If you come to bed beside me, I promise to hold the candle so that you can see all the way to the back of your throat, and moreover I promise not to scorch your hair, though I cannot speak to my own nightshirt.”  
  
“I should take my temperature once we have a good reading for Musichetta.”  
  
“That’s the spirit. Lying down for a half hour sounds very wise. What were you telling me about rest?”  
  
“Oh, but what shall we do about —”  
  
“We have everything we need here, don’t you think? Water, cake, wine, sundry homeopathic medicines, pastilles, more wine, tea, we can ask the landlady for a broth, and Combeferre I am sure will come by later today if you want to crow over him and discuss theories of contagion.”  
  
“Well — hmmph. Will you hold the mirror for me, too, so that I can take notes? I want to draw my tongue.”  
  
  
They passed the rest of the day in cosy somnolence; and she found that the tenderness she’d shrunk from came more easily, as if the heart had more space to move when the world had shrunk to the size of one warm bed.  
  
As if he’d read her thoughts, Lesgle said, “Do you know, I’ve not thought about the King for hours.”  
  
He spoke softly, for Joly had finally fallen asleep, his notebook still opened upside-down on his lap and his spectacles all at an angle on his nose.  
  
“It’s surprising how easy it is,” she said, lightly. “I think, in fact, that many people go whole days without paying him much mind at all.”  
  
“Not us, though,” said Joly, startling her — both because she had thought him asleep, and also, she realised, because he’d undoubtedly intended to include herself as part of their ‘us’, whereas it had never occurred to her to do so. Did she mind the King so often? Only as a lack in the world, a boundary set upon their joy, the cold reminder she tried to give herself from time to time that Joly would marry some bourgeois girl and Lesgle would pass the bar and both of them would go to the South, or to Meaux, or somewhere else, and she would be left with some dresses and jewellery, a few of Joly’s stilted, unpoetic letters, and regret, regret, regret.  
  
“There you go!” said Lesgle. “I mentioned him, and now we’re all thinking of him again, and feeling awfully melancholy. I take full responsibility. I shall never speak of him again.”  
  
She thought suddenly of songs she had sung as a child, the ones that warned girls off marrying soldiers. Was that what she’d done, after all?  
  
  
The next day was Christmas day, and she felt a good deal better. Joly was worse, but had still managed to get up in the night and place a pair of Oriental slippers, with curled toes, by the fireplace for her — and a coin inside them, as if she’d been a child. Lesgle gave her a book of poems. Joly gave Lesgle some sort of desperately unwise tasseled hat. Between them they told her the story of Jean Prouvaire’s involvement with that year’s present selection. Then Lesgle went out for a loaf, and came back with a kitten.  
  
“I found her wandering the Paris streets alone, this feline gamine,” he said. “There you go, Jollly, she’s your Christmas present. I spotted her from the window the other day, and Fortuna was kind for once and did not lead her too far from here in the interim.”  
  
Joly was altogether delighted, his face flushed with fever and appreciation; the kitten crawled up his shirt and fell asleep under his chin.  
  
They were happy, and if a boundary existed, it was one they could, at least for a while, forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] The symptoms Musichetta has - fever, sore throat with no cough or hoarseness, redness with white patches on the throat, tongue and tonsils, and lymph node enlargement - all point to what would now be called strep throat in the US, although in the UK we tend to be less specific and just talk about a generic ‘tonsillitis’. It’s not serious in itself, although it’s often treated with antibiotics to prevent complications - although in adults without a previous medical history these are very rare, and it’s officially contraindicated.
> 
> [2] The Belladonna Joly uses is a homeopathic preparation of atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade, while Mercurius is, as the name suggests, just mercury. Both would be diluted homeopathically, ie to a point where there is little to no active material in the solution, and then formed into sugar pills to be taken more easily. They are both commonly used for pain and fever, with belladonna specifically used for states of high inflammation and mercurius for a changeable presentation with soreness and irritability.
> 
> [3] Cynanche tonsillaris is just a canon-era medical term for tonsillitis in the specific presentation that’s now known to be mostly caused by streptococcus pyogenes. The reason Combeferre is relieved not to find ulceration is that this would suggest one of the possible serious complications: quinsy, ie a peritonsillar abscess. It’s highly unpleasant and can be fatal, especially in a pre-antibiotic era. 
> 
> [4] Doctors were aware that some illnesses appeared to pass from one person to another. Moreover, some seemed to happen in epidemics while others were confined to families or acquaintances. For localised infections the best explanation seemed to be the case that rotting or decaying material had somehow made it into the infected area via close contact. However, this would require physical proximity, and there was not really a way to describe how an incubation period might occur. 
> 
> [5] There was considerable debate at the time about the fundamental nature of fever. Joly is firmly of the view that it is a cardiac process involving a raised pulse, with the additional heat only a side-effect. Nowadays we would use the term ‘fever’ for the raised temperature alone, and say that although the pulse does usually rise predictably with rising fever (according to Liebermaster’s rule, whereby each celsius grade of raised fever leads to an 8bpm increase in pulse rate), there are circumstances that might lead to high pulse without fever (anxiety, exertion) and high fever but low pulse (known as Faget’s sign, this can occur with certain infections such as yellow fever, typhoid and brucellosis). Combeferre is undecided. 
> 
> [6] A ‘tumour’ is just the contemporary term for any significant, well-delimited swelling. It would be another possible sign of quinsy, and thus potentially a medical emergency. 
> 
> [7] The antiphlogistic course was the bread-and-butter treatment for all fevers, a combination of bleeding, emetics and laxatives. It was about as standard as paracetamol/NSAIDs for fever are today: definitely the first thing you’d go for to provide immediate relief. Musichetta’s resistance is perhaps understandable, but Joly’s is unusual and is due to his weird faith in alternative medicine. 
> 
> [8] Homeopaths’ term for non-homeopathic medicine. 
> 
> [9] Some kind of preservation of corpses for dissection purposes was indeed standard in the medical schools of the time, although before the invention of formaldehyde the options for doing this were limited and only partially effective. Still, probably a good thing.
> 
> [10] Artists, please don’t put your turpentine in cups for drinking. This is in fact something that still occasionally causes cases of fatal poisoning. 
> 
> [11] At the time, thermometers were 12 inches long and took twenty to thirty minutes to give a reading. Moreover, there was still no data for normal human body temperature to compare things with. However, doctors were nonetheless beginning to use thermometers to track the changes in temperature through the course of an illness. Given the length of time the patient needed to stay still for the reading, an axillary/armpit measurement was the most comfortable, although of course not all doctors took that aspect into account. However, Musichetta would probably not have agreed to any of the alternatives.


	2. Chapter 2

It was halfway through January when Joly surprised her again at her room. It was an extravagantly rainy, grey afternoon, and she was settling down with a novel, and there again were the four knocks to the door, but this time quick and insistent, and then followed by another group of four. She opened the door and he was there, soaked through and shaking.  
  
He said nothing until they were inside, then he limped heavily over to her bed and scrubbed at his face. His breath was heavy, and he was wheezing slightly.  
  
“Bossuet’s been arrested,” he said. “We were on an errand, and — oh, it all went wrong.”  
  
He was crying, and went through several of her handkerchiefs before he could speak again.  
  
“We ought to tell people,” he said. “Enjolras, and — and I should get out of these clothes, I’m wet through and chilled — my bones ache.”  
  
There was nothing for him to wear but one of her nightgowns; even distraught as he was, he couldn’t help laughing at himself.  
  
“I’ll try to dry your own clothes by the fire,” she said.  
  
“Thank you,” he said; he was becoming solemn again, ridiculous as he looked from within the nightdress, and shaking either with fear or cold, she couldn’t tell which. “We should let the others know. Could you…?”  
  
“Of course. Try to keep warm,” she said, and wrapped a blanket around him and a coat around herself, then headed out.  
  
  
She headed for his friend Combeferre’s, since she knew where it was, and found him there with Courfeyrac, another member of the political group whom she’d met on a couple of occasions.  
  
“I’ll get Enjolras,” said Combeferre, his face grim.  
  
“Joly needs dry clothes, too,” said Musichetta. “He was caught in the rain, I think, and got soaked.”  
  
Combeferre nodded and pulled some items carelessly from a drawer. It was a far from tidy flat; every surface seemed to be covered with oddities, mechanisms, animal parts and diagrams.  
  
“How was he?” he asked.  
  
“Shaken, I think,” said Musichetta.  
  
“Of course he is,” said Courfeyrac. “Cold and miserable, I’m sure. Well, let’s head back to him, shall we? Combeferre, do you know the address?”  
  
He did not, of course; she wrote it out for him on a slip of paper, and Courfeyrac gaily took her arm.  
  
“Don’t worry,” he said as they stepped out into the rain. “These things always seem a great deal worse than they turn out to be. We’ve had our share of crises, and Bossuet always falls on his feet, somehow.”  
  
Joly was pale and big-eyed when they got back, but he was no longer crying, and gave a somewhat effortful smile.  
  
“Now, Joly,” said Courfeyrac. “We’ve some rather more suitable clothes for you, and you must tell me what happened. I’m sure we can set things right one way or another.” He glanced around at Musichetta and looked somewhat embarrassed. “I don’t suppose you’d mind going to fetch some brandy? I think Joly here could do with a little fortification, don’t you think? Here, this should cover it —”  
  
She understood him; and it should not have stung, and yet. She took the coins he offered, and quietly left the room.  
  
  
When she returned, Combeferre and Enjolras were in the flat, but the atmosphere was a good deal jollier. She went to sit on the bed beside a greatly relaxed Joly, who nonetheless seemed very small inside Combeferre’s much larger clothes.  
  
“They think he’ll be all right,” he said to her quietly. “That the police won’t have much on him. He may be questioned, but he’s unlikely to stand trial - they ought to release him soon enough.”  
  
“That’s good, at least,” she said, feeling suddenly, by its absence, the stone of worry she had been carrying inside her chest.  
  
“It’s something,” he admitted. “Still, I feel dreadful. I shouldn’t have gone out in the rain, certainly not without an umbrella — not that one would have done me much good today. We had to run, and I thought my knee would give out — it feels like it’s on fire, now.”  
  
She was used, by now, to his habit of listing symptoms as a substitute for other things that were harder to say — harder still, perhaps, to feel. She let him curl into her shoulder until the others had left, which was not long; her return had somewhat dampened the conversation.  
  
“We should go back to yours,” she said once they were alone. “You’ll be more comfortable in your own bed.”  
  
He nodded drowsily, but when he tried to get up it turned out that his knee was a great deal more painful than he’d accounted for. She had to help him down the stairs, and, it being clear that he could not walk home, they summoned a cab.  
  
“I must have strained it, running,” he said, twisting his mouth with discomfort. He dosed himself with Arnica, drank more brandy, and busied himself with scratching the kitten’s ears while reading a medical journal. But the knee, far from calming itself now that he was resting, worsened. Combeferre’s trousers, oversized as they were, pressed against it, and when they took them off, the knee was swollen, red and hot to touch.  
  
“Hm!” he said, tilting his head to one side. “Nux Vomica, maybe?”[12]  
  
She touched his flushed cheek, and pulled back her hand in surprise. “You’re burning.”  
  
“Belladonna, then, I think.”  
  
Lesgle will know what to do, she thought, and then remembered; it felt suddenly as if she were drowning. Joly was gazing at her intently, his eyes shining bright as buttons with fever.  
  
“You mustn’t worry,” he said, with that solemn look that made her heart hurt in a way she wished it wouldn’t. “I’m almost certain this is acute rheumatism, which is rarely ever fatal. I had it once as a child, you know. It hurt, and they bled me a great deal more than they ought, I think, but I recovered perfectly well. It does sometimes progress from acute to chronic — but generally only in the elderly.”[13]  
  
He was often calmest, she’d found, when he had become unambiguously ill. And yet, her stomach kept knotting itself up. He was inspecting his tongue with great interest.  
  
“I should get some more brandy,” she said, reusing Courfeyrac’s excuse from earlier, and hurried out into the night. It had stopped raining. She felt dizzy. She felt that she had held her life up to the light, and seen only its fragility, a translucent skin stretched over delicate bones.  
  
  
Joly woke her in the night, drenched with sweat and crying in pain.  
  
“What can I do for you?” she asked. “Do you want opium?”  
  
He’d taken that before, for headaches and other sundry complaints, and she was sure she knew where it was, but he shook his head.  
  
“It’s too calmitive,” he said. “Depressing the system would be unwise, I think.[14] I’ll have some more Belladonna — or perhaps I should have taken the Nux Vom. after all? My head’s all a muddle.”  
  
He laughed apologetically. She lit a candle and brought him his little brown bottles, but then he couldn’t open them, for although his knee had returned to its usual size, his wrists were now as swollen and heated as the knee had been the night before. She uncorked one after another under his instruction, but his helplessness panicked her.  
  
“Could you wipe my face down?” he said — and she felt slow and clumsy for not having thought of that, since he was still sweating copiously. She fetched a bowl of water and a handkerchief and bathed his face and neck.  
  
“Please take something for the pain,” she said, after too long watching him move restlessly about on the bed. “How long were you sick for, before?”  
  
“I can’t remember, exactly. A week or two, perhaps.”  
  
“Well, you’ll need to sleep, and I can’t imagine you sleeping like this.”  
  
He sighed. “All right. A little laudanum, maybe.”  
  
She fetched that, and fed him a spoonful; and before long he was sleeping, if restlessly. She paced around the room a bit before lying down beside him, uncertain if she herself could rest. But she drifted off, as she always did.  
  
  
At first light she sent a boy with a note to Combeferre, and he came over at once.  
  
“No news of Bossuet just yet,” he said. “But we’ve people waiting outside the station, and I’ll let you know if there’s any movement. Now, what can I do for you? From the sound of things, I think your diagnosis is very likely to be correct, but I’d like to check some things first, if that’s all right with you.”  
  
“Go ahead,” said Joly, smiling a little thinly. “I’m sure Musichetta would appreciate the reassurance.”  
  
She prickled at that, on instinct, but held her tongue.  
  
Combeferre’s examination was going quite smoothly until he came to the auscultation; she thought at first that it was Joly’s lungs that made him frown and purse his lips and listen again, front and back.  
  
“Joly,” he said in measured tones, “I’m sure you’ve noticed that your pulse is unusually fast, even for a fever.”  
  
Joly nodded.  
  
“Well, there’s something else — an odd sound, when I listen to your heart. I don’t know what to make of it, if I’m honest. I think I’ve heard of this sometimes occurring in acute synovial rheumatism, but I’d have to check the paper again to be sure of it. It’s odd, as I said — a sort of rubbing sound.[15] I wish you could listen to it yourself.”  
  
Joly had gone pale, the flush of his cheeks retreating to two red points. “Do you think it’s concerning?”  
  
“It’s an irregularity of the heart, which is rarely not concerning — but as I said, I don’t know what to make of it. It may be temporary; some kinds of inflammation seem to affect the heart, and if the fever is indeed essentially vascular then it shouldn’t be so surprising for there to be some sort of cardiac involvement — but that I’m not sure that’s much comfort, either. I have some books which might help — and if it comes to it, we’ll take you to the hospital, where greater minds than mine might have more ability to interpret it.”  
  
There it was again — that falling sensation, the floor dropping away from under her.  
  
“I’d like to consult my library about this,” Combeferre was continuing. “And I’m sure, in due course, you’ll want to do the same. But in the mean time, we need to talk about treatment.”  
  
Joly set his jaw. “I don’t think it would be wise to open a vein before we have a clearer idea of what’s wrong with my heart.”[16]  
  
Combeferre winced. “I thought you’d say that. And I’m not sure you’re wrong — but it might also be unwise to delay treatment. Sometimes — sometimes we need to act, even under circumstances that are far from ideal.”  
  
“I would prefer to try other treatments, first,” said Joly.  
  
“Well then, let’s not talk about a generalised bleed — will you at least allow me to do a little local bleeding? You surely can’t argue that the quantity of blood in your wrists is what it should be — I’d like to try to relieve that with a cupping, preceded by scarification.[17] Would you consent to that?”  
  
Joly let out a long breath. “Yes. I trust you. Do it, if you think it’s the wisest thing.”  
  
“Thank you.” Combeferre seemed sincerely grateful.  
  
He had brought his bag with him, and took out of it a sort of thick pen or stamp, with a cluster of terrifyingly sharp needles set into it in place of a nib[18], and some little glass cups. He scratched at Joly’s poor wrists with the former, and then placed a cup, heated over a candle flame, upon each of the places he’d scratched at. The cups seemed to suck at the skin, drawing it up in a mound, and droplets of blood sprung above the scratched surface, like dewdrops on the petal of a rose.[19] Musichetta stroked his cheek and tried to talk to him, to distract him — once again she thought of how much more easily Lesgle would have made him laugh, even now. She felt angry with herself, angry with a host of abstractions — sickness, monarchy, contingency. But still, she tried to keep talking.  
  
  
When Combeferre had gone, Joly turned to her and said, as he had so many times before — but never before, God help her, had she felt inclined to take it seriously —  
  
“My will’s in the bureau, in the third drawer. You remember?”  
  
“Yes,” she said, uncomfortable.  
  
He was still wearing Combeferre’s too-big shirt. “I — you’re provided for, I promise. I made sure of it. I’ve been saving my allowance, and there are a few other things — Bossuet, too. I hope it’s enough, for both of you.”  
  
She didn’t want to hear it, but he caught her wrist, though it must have hurt him to do it.  
  
“Please,” he said. “It’s important. I want you to know that I wouldn’t just — leave you, without making sure you’d be all right.”  
  
She felt all her anger at abstractions, which had beens swirling around the room, draw together and into her heart. Then it burst forth.  
  
“Wouldn’t leave me!” she said. “Why, I — I know you’d do just that, at the drop of a pin. If you wanted to make sure I was safe, well, then you’d — you’d take more care!”  
  
This was absurd, and she knew it to be so; Joly took more care than anyone she knew, took too much care, often; but she was too tired and afraid to be reasonable.  
  
“Going out on errands in the rain!” she continued. “Couldn’t they have waited until it was at least a little dry? Why —”  
  
She would never know how she would have ended the sentence, for at that moment Courfeyrac burst into the room, accompanied — oh, her heart said, and gave a little skip — by a somewhat rumpled Lesgle. The latter almost tripped over himself running to where she and Joly were sitting.  
  
“God, the messes you two get into when I’m away for a few hours,” he said. “Joly, I never saw a man make as much fuss over getting rained on in my life.”  
  
Joly laughed, a genuine, delighted laugh, and the kitten, as if it wanted to join the commotion, sprang up onto the bed.  
  
  
They had a difficult few weeks, after that; it seemed that no longer had Combeferre’s cupping calmed the inflammation in one joint than it sprang up in another, and so he seemed always to be chasing it around Joly’s body, like a cat chasing a mouse from one chair to the next.[20] And he continued to frown when he listened to Joly’s chest; at one point he had one of their professors come to listen along, but that gentleman had no wisdom to impart other than a stern speech about the dangers of avoiding venesection in cases of cardiac involvement. But even that seemed to right itself[21], maybe sooner even than the rheumatic pains; by February Joly was walking about, and by the end of February he was doing so as steadily as he ever had.[22]  
  
“I promise,” he said to her, one dreary, cold morning, as the three of them lay in their warm bed.  
  
“Promise what?” she asked.  
  
“Promise not to do any more errands in the rain, if I can help it.”  
  
She laughed. “Oh, you shouldn’t take me so seriously, that day I was —”  
  
“No, I mean it. I can’t promise a great deal — but I’ll try to keep myself from getting wetter than I need to be. That’ll have to be enough. I just don’t want you to think that I — I want you to believe me, that I — want to get through all this, and live with you in a Republic, or — or the closest thing we can make to one, even if it’s just the three of us.”  
  
“Seconded,” said Lesgle. “It’s not often that Joly’s eloquence exhausts everything I might have to say on a matter — but I think this time he’s outdone himself, and also me, which is even more impressive.”  
  
Musichetta sighed, and looked from one to the other. “It's not much of a promise, to be perfectly honest,”  she said, with a smile. “But — well, it means a great deal to me, all the same. So I suppose it’ll have to do.”  
  


It was like loving a bird in flight, she thought — two birds, even, rising through currents of air and gliding effortlessly out of view in the iron-grey sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [12] Nux Vomica is another homeopathic remedy, one used to treat conditions involving sensitivity, pain at the slightest touch, and inflammation. 
> 
> [13] ’Acute rheumatism’ just means a short-lived arthritis. Usually, this would be due what was later known as rheumatic fever. This is an uncommon complication of untreated strep throat. It is very rare for it to occur for the first time in adults - but if someone had it as a child, they will be at risk after any subsequent strep infection, although this risk does diminish over time. It presents a 1-6 weeks after the onset of strep symptoms, by which time the patient has usually recovered from their initial illness. Because of this, it took surprisingly long for the pattern to be noticed; I couldn’t find anything before the mid nineteenth century where doctors even recorded that all of their acute rheumatism patients seemed to have just got over a sore throat. Perhaps that’s because it didn’t make much sense for the two to be connected at the time. In fact, rheumatic fever is an autoimmune disease, caused because the antibodies produced to fight streptococcus pyogenes can sometimes end up attacking healthy body tissue instead, resulting in polyarthritis and high fever. It would have been next to impossible to explain this using canon-era physiology.
> 
> [14] One thing that authors did seem to agree on was that even though acute rheumatism might seem like a disease that involved over-excitation of the system, in fact any depressant might debilitate the patient to a dangerous extent. 
> 
> [15] About half of all cases of rheumatic fever involve carditis or pericarditis, in which the heart tissues are also attacked by antibodies. Pericarditis has a characteristic sound on auscultation; it’s called a ‘pericardial rub’, and apparently sounds a little bit like squeaky leather.
> 
> [16] As Joly knows, the customary response to any heart problem would be to remove a good quantity of blood in order to relieve the pressure on the heart. Again, his stubborn resistance to this is fairly cranky. 
> 
> [17] A distinction was often made between generalised bleeding - taking a lot of blood from a vein, usually on the wrist - and localised bleeding - taking a smaller amount of blood from superficial cuts directly over the affected area or organ. Since Joly’s wrists are red and swollen, and therefore clearly full of far too much blood, it is difficult for him to argue against this as a symptomatic treatment.
> 
> [18] A scarifier was a device that was useful for localised bleeding. It was used to scratch at the surface of the skin; to that end a number of needles or small blades were embedded in a sort of pen. 
> 
> [19] Cupping in many traditions is usually done ‘dry’, ie without breaking the skin. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, for instance, it would not generally be done at all over ulcerated or broken skin. However, for nineteenth century European doctors the combination with local bleeding was irresistable, as it allows a larger volume of blood to be drawn from shallower cuts. Combeferre is doing this so as to obtain as much local relief as possible, by ‘deflating’ Joly’s swollen joints as much as he can. 
> 
> [20] This pattern of polyarthritis, where the inflammation seems to jump around from one joint to the other, is characteristic of rheumatic fever, but as Combeferre and Joly don’t know that it is understandable that they think that the cupping is doing its job. 
> 
> [21] The carditis in rheumatic fever may resolve entirely, or may cause permanent damage which eventually becomes rheumatic heart disease, a condition in which the valves of the heart are damaged by repeated autoimmune attack, leading in time to heart failure. I couldn’t bring myself to do this to Joly, even though he would uh, never have reached the point where it caused an issue anyway. At the end of this he’s FINE and that’s all I’m going to focus on for now. 
> 
> [22] Unlike heart inflammation, the joint inflammation in rheumatic fever does not tend to leave permanent damage. Although contemporary authors talked about acute rheumatism sometimes leading to chronic rheumatism, this was, as they noted, generally in older patients, and was probably not rheumatic fever but a sudden onset of rheumatoid arthritis.


End file.
